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> From: Bill Bartlett <[log in to unmask]>
> To: [log in to unmask]
> Subject: Re: [CHOMSKY] "I'm a communist" - Che Guevara
> Date: Sunday, June 22, 1997 11:10 AM
>
<snip>
>
> >Paying lower wages and overworking your employees may be the only
> >feasible short-term strategy for competing with larger businesses, but
> >it's hardly efficient, any more than is redlining your 4-cylinder car to
> >outrace a V-8.
>
> Denends who's paying for the motors? You are right in the wider sense,
but
> the capitalist is not, cannot be concerned with the wider social costs,
> only the bottom line.
>
> Paying lower wages and overworking your employees would only have an
> adverse effect on the bottom line if the labour market was not massively
> skewed in favour of the buyers of labour. If unemployment were lower
> employees would be in a position to demand better wages and conditions or
> take up another job. That is not case for any but a few (and their days
are
> numbered) in today's world. So bad conditions are the most efficient
> strategy, in fact the only VIABLE strategy in every way that counts.
>
> Consider: if your competitor pays lower wages than you then his cost of
> production is lower - he can then undercut your price - nobody buys your
> brand so you must do the same or go out of business.
>
> The logic is implacable, but in case you're not convinced by logic alone
> just look around you - the proof is in the pudding.
>
> >But on your larger point, I don't see where the
> >disagreement is.
>
> On the larger point (sentimentality over small business) there is no
> disagreement, I said that. I was just quibbling over your generalisation
> that big corps are more efficient. The logic behind this assertion is
> reasonable, but is not the logic of capitalism.

Although I am not misty-eyed for either small-owner or monopoly capitalism,
I disagree strongly. Larger enterprises have the wherewithal to exploit
much more "efficiently"; look at the "company town" model, for example.
Also, the high unemployment pressure that they have helped to impose place
them at a distinct advantage (in terms of waivers from state and federal
labor laws and regs, taxes, etc.), and their mere size, aside from
providing economies of scale, also allow them to wield considerably more
power against labor (e.g., legal costs that can be spent in litigation
against worker's claims, pension profiteering, etc., etc.) than the small
owner.

- DDeBar
> As you pointed out to me when I made the same mistake on the issue of
> intellectual property:
>
>         "...if we live in a society governed by one set of (capitalist)
>         rules, it's not unreasonable to expect those rules to be, shall
>         we say, symbiotic, and within that framework, defensible."
>         (4 Jun 1997)
>
> Bill Bartlett
> Bracknell Tasmania